Windsurf has evolved from a basic autocomplete tool into a comprehensive AI-powered toolkit, now offering search, chat, and agentic capabilities. Its growth mirrors a broader shift toward more intelligent, context-aware developer tools.

Since launching in beta in 2022, Windsurf’s extension for VS Code has reached nearly 2.7 million installs, steadily adding features like conversational interfaces and support for newer AI models. Each update has expanded the scope of what developers can do directly within their editors.

A major milestone came in November 2024 with the release of Windsurf’s own code editor, a custom fork of Visual Studio Code. With deeper control over the development experience, Windsurf launched Cascade — a system introducing persistent memory, multi-file editing, agent-based workflows, and support for the model-context-protocol (MCP). 

As the boundaries of what AI can do in software development expand, it raises the question — what should a modern coding environment look like?